Melissa Chessington Leo is an American actress. She is the recipient of several accolades, including an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, a Golden Globe Award, two Critics' Choice Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Charlotte Sally Potter is an English film director and screenwriter. She is best known for directing Orlando (1992), which won the audience prize for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival.
Nicole Holofcener is an American film and television director and screenwriter. She has directed six feature films, including Walking and Talking, Friends with Money and Enough Said, as well as various television series. Along with Jeff Whitty, Holofcener received a 2019 Academy Award nomination for Adapted Screenplay and won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the film Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018).
Yasmin binti Ahmad was a Malaysian film director, writer and scriptwriter. She was the executive creative director at Leo Burnett Kuala Lumpur. Her television commercials and films are well known in Malaysia for being humorous and touching. Her work crossed cross-cultural barriers, particularly her ads for Petronas, the national oil and gas company. Her works have won multiple awards both within Malaysia and internationally. In Malaysia, her films were highly controversial due to their depiction of events and relationships, which have been considered 'forbidden' by social conservatives, especially hard-line interpretations of Islam.
Donna Deitch is an American film and television director, producer, and writer best known for her 1985 film Desert Hearts. The movie was the first feature film to depict a lesbian love story in a generally mainstream vein, with positive and respectful themes.
Heather Rae is an American film and television producer and director. She has worked on documentary and narrative film projects, and is best known for Frozen River, Trudell, and Tallulah.
Leila Afua Djansi is an American and Ghanaian filmmaker who started her film career in the Ghana film industry.
Open Your Eyes is a 2008 short film written and directed by Susan Cohen.
Melody Gilbert is an independent documentary filmmaker, and educator from Washington, D.C. now living in Natchitoches, Louisiana. She has directed, filmed, produced, and sometimes edited, seven independent feature-length documentaries since 2002. The Documentary Channel calls her "one of the most fearless filmmakers in contemporary documentary cinema." She is currently an assistant professor of journalism at Northwestern State University.
The Naperville Independent Film Festival is an annual film festival held in Naperville, Illinois, United States, which features the work of independent filmmakers.
Greta Celeste Gerwig is an American actress, writer, and director. She first garnered attention after working on and appearing in several mumblecore films. Between 2006 and 2009, she appeared in a number of films by Joe Swanberg, some of which she co-wrote or co-directed, including Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007) and Nights and Weekends (2008).
Melissa Goad is an actress and model, mostly known for independent dramas and horror movies.
Mika'ela Fisher, also known as Mika'Ela Fisher or Mikaela Fisher, is a German film director, writer, producer, actress, model, and master tailor. She gained recognition as an actor for her role in the movie Tell No One. In 2013 she produced and directed her first short film, Die Tapferen Haende im Chaos der Zeit.
Tracie Laymon is an American screenwriter, producer and film director. Laymon was raised in Houston, Texas, and studied film at the University of Texas at Austin. She began her film career with work in the Texas area, and several of her music videos and short films were recognized with film festival awards. She served in film production capacities in multiple movies, including Matchstick Men in 2003 and The Alamo in 2004. Laymon moved to California in 2005, and continued film production work there, serving as production assistant on films The Ringer in 2005 and Blades of Glory in 2007. Her short film Inside premiered in 2009 at the Milan International Film Festival in Milan, Italy, and won the award in "Best Short Film" from the Women's Image Network. She also directed the first ever half-hour comedy for the internet entitled "Goodnight Burbank", which premiered on Hulu.com in April 2011 and was personally acquired by Mark Cuban that same day. The shows then aired on Cuban's HDNet in the fall of 2011. Her most recent short film "A Hidden Agender" premiered at the Dallas International Film Festival and received the Jury Award for Best Dark Comedy at the Houston International Film Festival in 2012. Laymon was also named to the Independent Film Channel's list of emerging "Icons" and "Film Innovators". She is currently in development of her first feature film, which she also wrote. The original screenplay received the Jury Award for Best Screenplay at the LA Comedy Festival in December 2013. Laymon is in development of this feature film and plans to direct it in Texas in 2017.
Joanna Hogg is a British film director and screenwriter. She made her directorial and screenwriting feature film debut in 2007 with Unrelated followed by Archipelago (2010) and Exhibition (2013). Two of her films, The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir Part II (2021), topped the Sight & Sound annual poll for best film in their respective years, receiving nominations at the British Independent Film Awards, the Independent Spirit Awards and at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Leviathan is a 2012 American documentary directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. It is a work about the North American fishing industry. The film has been acquired for U.S. distribution by The Cinema Guild.
Maya Gallus is a Canadian documentary filmmaker, and co-founder of Red Queen Productions with Justine Pimlott. Her films have screened at international film festivals, including Toronto International Film Festival, Montreal World Film Festival, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, SEOUL International Women’s Film Festival, Singapore International Film Festival, This Human World Film Festival (Vienna) and Women Make Waves (Taiwan), among others. Her work has also screened at the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Donostia Kultura, San Sebastián and Canada House UK, as well as theatrically in Tokyo, San Francisco, Key West and Toronto, and been broadcast around the world. She has won numerous awards, including a Gemini Award for Best Direction for Girl Inside, and has been featured in The Guardian, UK; Ms. (Magazine), Curve (Magazine), Bust (Magazine), Salon (Magazine), POV and The Walrus, among others. She is a Director/Writer alumna of the Canadian Film Centre and a participant in Women in the Director’s Chair. She will be honoured with a "Focus On" retrospective at the 2017 Hot Docs festival.
Hilary Brougher is a screenwriter and director based in New York City She is best known for her 2006 feature film Stephanie Daley starring Tilda Swinton and Melissa Leo.
Vanessa Parise is an American film director, writer, producer, and actress based in NYC, New York. Her first feature film Kiss the Bride won the Golden Starfish Award at the Hamptons Film Festival in 2002. Her television movies, Perfect High and Drink Slay Love have been named by the Lifetime’s Broad Focus initiative. Parise has been nominated for Leo Awards for Best Direction for Lighthouse in 2015, for Perfect High in 2016, for Beyond in 2018, and for The Simone Biles Story in 2019. Her television movie The Simone Biles Story was nominated for Best Television Movie and Best Lead Actress by the NAACP Awards in 2019.
Before Anything You Say is a 2017 Canadian experimental domestic drama film directed and produced by Shelagh Carter and written by Deborah Schnitzer about a couple struggling to maintain their love and marriage even as a life-altering decision threatens to tear them apart. Carter's second indepdendent feature film is partly autobiographical, its "impulse" based on an event in Carter's own life and another experience in Schnitzer's. The film toured mainly in Europe, at Film Festival International-organized events in 2017 and 2018, winning a handful of awards ahead of its Canadian premiere at the Gimli Film Festival in 2018, where Shelagh Carter was presented with an award by the Directors Guild of Canada.
